


Among the oceans and the stars

by Yuu_chi



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Reincarnation, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 06:26:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5081134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yuu_chi/pseuds/Yuu_chi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a blessing to have your soulmate twice over; Eren wishes it were as simple and painless as that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Among the oceans and the stars

Eren is born with stardust written into his skin and the universe in his eyes.

Twice blessed, they call him, for the words on his collar and the gold of one iris to the green of the other. Somewhere out there is a half that has followed him from life to death and life again; somewhere out there is someone whose voice has sung itself into his flesh and bone.

And that’s nice, more than nice – crazy and breath taking and honestly awe inspiring – but the language in his skin is long gone and Eren’s memories are fuzzy at best; catches of thin smiles and silver eyes and dark hair that scatter about his brain like dandelion fluff yet never manages to still no matter how hard he wishes.

“ _They’ll come_ ,” his mother tells him when Eren is young and restless, hand on his head warm and familiar. “ _A half always wants to be whole_.”

(the words on his mother’s wrist are as dead as the ones on Eren’s collarbone, and he asks her, sometimes, what she remembers of her Before, but she never says. Both her eyes are a lonely blue.)

When Eren starts school the other children fawn about him like he’s a novelty. For them there’s sometimes mismatched eyes or words hewn to hips or the bend of a wrist, but never both; never, ever so lucky as to have both.

On the first day of health class his teachers watch him with hungry, curious gazes as they talk of Befores and Nows; that the words on your skin were your goodbyes from a previous life, your Before, and that the mismatched eyes were to say your soulmate was waiting for you somewhere out there today, that they were in your Now.

That you either got one or the other; you’d either had them before or would have them now, to have them twice over was the greatest gift the universe could give.

And Eren learns to hate the both of them; the Before in the feverish hand writing two inches from his throat and the Now that is the sun in his right eye to the sea in the left.

Even when he is young Eren is an introverted child, although he tries not to be. He finds quiet unsettling and loudness frightening although he can never say why, finds it hard to sit and stay where he’s wanted when there’s so much energy making him want to _move_ , finds it difficult, even, to accept the smallest of kindnesses passed his way.

It manifests itself in the thick glasses he wears to hide his eyes and the careful bandage over the words in his skin. His mother lets him do what he wants, but she watches him with thin lips and long suffering sighs, and he knows she finds it unbecoming for a parent to be jealous of their child, but she _is_ and they both know it.

When Eren turns fifteen he dreams one night and it goes;

_White skin, dark hair, silver eyes – a smile like a knife edge, thin and just as dangerous. There’s a gentleness, though, in his fingertips. The careful way he uses them to cradle a mug, the brush of them through Eren’s hair when he thought him asleep, the blood that crusts beneath his nails from all the dying hands he holds._

Eren gasps awake with those hands in his mind and he finds himself crying without knowing why.

Over the years the dreams keep coming; sometimes they repeat;

_Fingers that fit so perfectly between Eren’s own –_

But sometimes he gets;

_Whispers in his ears – “it’s fine, you’re fine, you’re doing good, I’m here, I’m here” – and lips at his cheek, hands on his waist, tracing along his shoulders, his collar, where some day far beyond they’ll be marked with words Eren has long since stopped being able to read_.

And as he gets older it becomes;

_Too much breath, stuttering gasps, a tongue chasing the sweat that slicks down his throat, hips rocking together, a groan battering about in his ribcage as Eren fists one hand in the sheets beneath him and the other in thick black hair, back straining and lips moving soundlessly as he comes –_

On those nights Eren wakes up hard and frustrated and confused as he yearns for a touch he hasn’t felt in a thousand years, for fingers that have never touched him in this body.

(on worse nights though he dreams of this;

_Blood everywhere, breaking everything he touches, so much screaming and crying, running on legs that cannot possibly run anymore and reaching back for those who they have lost along the way, can’t stop shaking, shivering, and “I don’t want to die this way, please don’t let me die this way –.”_

Those are the nights he wakes up sick and trembling for fear that he can scarcely remember but feels so real. _)_

Never, though, does he get a name. He reaches for it and it slips from him and Eren always wakes with empty lips and emptier hands.

By the time he’s twenty Eren figures out this much about his Before; it was a long, long time ago – longer than even he can find in their history books, and it was bloody and unfair and Eren died so much younger than he ever deserved.

He was executed, he thinks, for something that was a crime in name only. On bad nights he wakes up convinced there’s something in his chest, ripping through his heart and breaking his ribs on the way. There never is, of course, but it’s a feeling that haunts him endlessly.

The more he dreams though, the closer Eren feels he gets to the words in his skin. Somedays he feels them settle up at the back of his head and he can almost grasp them, he swears _he can almost reach them_.

“You need to let it go,” his friend tells him one day when Eren comes to work with bags under his eyes.

“I can’t,” he tells her and he means it as much as he hates it; misses being twelve and petulant against it all.

She looks at him with eyes that are brown on both sides and Eren can just see the tiny scrawl of her Before peeking out below her ear. “Sometimes,” she says sadly, “it’s best not to know at all.”

(much later when they are both drunk and lonely she shows it to him and it says _this should have been you_ and Eren tells her earnestly he’ll love her for all the pain she’s felt, because as far as last words to your forever one goes there are few things worse to wear in your skin.)

Still, Eren can’t let it go and one night he dreams –

_Sand between his toes and an ocean so much bluer than a sky could ever be. It’s endless in a way he’d never considered trapped behind the walls and Eren has never felt as at peace as he does now._

_He squeezes the hand in his own and it squeezes back._

_“Eren –.”_

_“It’s alright,” he says, and he doesn’t turn from the ocean even as he feels those beautiful, beautiful fingertips on his face. “This is how I want it. You and me and all this ocean. Not a single wall in sight.”_

_There’s a breath that matches the shaky fingertips on his face. “I don’t know if I can.”_

_“You have to,” Eren says firmly. “Please. Let me choose this. I don’t want it to be in a courtroom with me on my knees and you doing it alone even as half the city watches.” There’s silence and, again, he says, “please,” and this time his voice breaks._

_The waves are loud at the shore and then Levi says, “okay.”_

_Eren turns and he puts his hands to his face, lips to Levi’s forehead. Levi clutches at his wrist and although he does not cry his shoulders shudder and shake._

_“Thank you,” Eren says and he means it._

_He holds Levi’s hands as he guides his sword from his belt, directs it over where his heart is beating so much easier than he’d ever expect. Mikasa’s bloody scarf is around his waist and Armin’s ocean is before him and Levi is looking at him with such heart breaking tenderness that Eren knows that yes, this is it, this is how he wants to go._

_He touches his finger to Levi’s face one last time and he smiles and says, “I always knew this was how I would go.”_

_And Levi closes his eyes, opens his mouth, and says –_

_The sword slides in easy as a hot knife through butter and Eren lets himself die._

And thousands of years later Eren wakes up.

.

It’s a terrible, bitter day and Eren has been at work for longer than he ever wants to be again.

The weather outside is stormy and it’s driven in everybody from the beach so that Eren is waiting tables and scribbling orders so fast his hand cramps. The air is sticky and humid and it’s making his uniform tacky against his skin and every time he turns around he finds somebody new staring at his eyes or the writing on his collarbone because it’s much too hot to button all the way to his throat and he gave up wearing glasses years ago.

It’s enough to set a static beneath his skin and by the time there’s a break in the weather Eren has never been so glad to see the restaurant empty out as people dash home before they got caught between the thunder and nightfall.

Most days Eren likes job. It’s nothing fancy, but it comes with a small room upstairs that he gets free on top of his paycheck and a beautiful, beautiful view of white sand and blue-green ocean that matches the color of his normal eye. It’s unfortunate, though, that today is not one of those days, and Eren takes the chance to flip the _closed_ sign a half hour earlier than normal.

He’s just wiping down the counter when he hears the rattle of the door anyway and he looks up angrily. “We’re closed.”

“Bullshit you're closed,” says the voice at the door, laced with venom and annoyance as Eren looks up to see them shaking out water from their hair. “It’s only six and it’s fucking pissing down rain out there.”

Eren looks out the window just as it flashes yellow and he sighs, unable to, in good conscience, send him back out when the sky is rumbling ominously like that.

“Fair enough,” Eren says grudgingly, beckoning him in. “But keep the sign as it is and don’t drip water everywhere.”

“Yeah,” says the stranger as he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks idly about as he continues to, in fact, drip water everywhere.

“Oh for god sakes,” Eren says, throwing the cloth down on the counter and ducking into the backroom for a second before he comes out with a ratty towel.

The stranger stares at it disdainfully as Eren offers it to him. “I could probably catch tetanus from that thing.”

“But you’ll definitely catch a cold if you continue to stand there like that,” Eren says with gritted teeth and the stranger sighs and reaches out to take it and, as he does, their fingers brush.

Electricity shoots through Eren’s fingertips, up his numb arm and live wiring right to his heart.

_“I always knew this was how I would go,” Eren says._

_And Levi closes his eyes, opens his mouth, and says –_

The breath Eren sucks in rasps in his throat like sandpaper and his vision swims back and all he can see is a pale face and one silver eye to one gold; writing he recognizes as his own scratching his last words across the delicate hummingbird pulse of the hand he’s holding.

A light touch against his collar startles him violently and he looks down to see fingertips he’d recognize anywhere tracing out the words that rest over the stretch of his bone.

“ _And I always knew I’d love you until you did,”_ Levi whispers and his voice is reverent.

Eren swallows loudly and his grip shakes against Levi’s hand. His legs feel like water beneath him and before he can even think about it Levi’s hands are at his shoulders, easing the both of them down on to the floor.

“It’s alright,” Levi says, fingers in Eren’s hair even as he can’t stop touching the Before on Eren’s skin. “It’s alright, you’re fine, I’ve got you, I’ve always got you.”

Eren stares at the words on Levi’s skin and feels like he might cry.

“I’ve missed you,” he says, and, “I’m sorry,” and, “god, _I’ve missed you so much_.”

Outside the rain is loud, the waves at the beach crashing.

And it’s just them and the ocean.

 

**Author's Note:**

> why is everything I write lately reincarnation??


End file.
